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I have configured Thunderbird to download emails from my Gmail account. Essentially, this is back up of my Gmail account. In Gmail settings, I enabled POP download from the date of account creation.

Within a few days, Thunderbird downloaded all the mails from the date of account creation (back in 2004.) When it reached the date from early this year, the downloading slowed down dramatically. Earlier, it used to download 300-600 mails in every fetch request. It now download only one message at a time. At this rate, my mails will take forever to download.

One of the oft-repeated solution to this problem is to disable "Leave Message On Server" option. But, this means, the messages from my Gmail account will vanish and my local copy is no longer a back up copy.

How do I download my mailbox from Gmail at the rate of few tens, if not hundreds, of messages in every fetch request?

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Another thread on Gmail forum has the correct solution.

I resolved this issue as well by following what ant0nis did. Uncheck "Leave messages on the server" in Thunderbird, but LEAVE "When messages are accessed with POP:" to the setting "Keep Gmail's copy in Inbox"

GMail's setting needs be "Mail Settings" -> "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" -> "POP Download" -> "2. When messages are accessed with POP" -> "Keep Gmail's Copy in the Inbox". This setting ensures that the mails don't get deleted from your account even if they are downloaded from a POP email client.

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  • Shashikant Kore's answer did it for me. MacOsX Thunderbird 17.0 and Gmail. Unchecked Thunderbird's "leave mail on server" and I get them all at once now and they still remain stored by Gmail.
    – user181511
    Dec 20, 2012 at 2:09
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Please try following these troubleshooting steps. You may need to delete your POP configuration and re-add it.

There are also some other back-up solutions that might work for you, if your goal is just to back up your mail. Some volunteers from the Gmail community have been building one called Got Your Back.

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  • Thanks Sarah. I have found the solution and updated this question. Sep 3, 2011 at 5:16
  • Still active and now hosted at git.io/gyb
    – Dagelf
    Sep 26, 2022 at 4:54
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To download the most recent 5000 messages, all in one go, from several clients concurrently, simply add recent: in front of your POP authentication username.

Eg. if your email is [email protected], for POP authentication, just use recent:[email protected].

To download larger batches of messages from GMail, Google Apps, or Google Workspace, uncheck the Leave messages on server option in your Email client.

Alas, the POP all mail even messages already downloaded setting on the GMail interface still won't work as expected.

It seems the only option to download all your old mail in one go, is to use Google Takeout. Read more here. You can then simply index the downloaded mail spool/mbox file in most mail applications. Eg. here are instructions for Thunderbird.

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